Frederick Jackson
Turner is most famous for expounding the influential “Frontier Thesis” of
American history, a thesis he first introduced in 1893 and which he expanded
upon for the remainder of his scholarly career.See the
following link for a short biography.

In the settlement of
America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how
America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. . . . [T]he
frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The
wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries,
tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and
puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and
arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin
of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before
long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he
shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at
the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept
the conditions which it furnishes or perish, and so he fits himself into the
Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.

Little by little he
transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe . . .. The
fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier
was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense.
Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive
terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves
its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still
partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has
meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence
on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these
conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study
the really American part of our history.

. .
[T]he frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the
American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of
continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. . . . In the crucible
of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a
mixed race, Englishin neither
nationality nor characteristics.The
process has gone on from the early days to our own.

From the conditions of
frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of
travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common
traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as
survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization
succeeded. The result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its
striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness
and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find
expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic
but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant
individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and
exuberance which comes with freedom -- these are traits of the frontier, or
traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

The
last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with
its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western
development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger
combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at
Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band
of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut
Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers
of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed
the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had
become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the East found
themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such
magnitude as dwarfed their former experience. The Great Lakes, the Prairies,
the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri,
furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial
democracy. Individualism began to give way to coöperation and to governmental
activity. Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the
wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal
improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its
assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the
Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to
States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation
lines.

Moreover,
with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains,
new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the
social tendency of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln
could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his
clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial
independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to
work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation
made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his
individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far
West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer
methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, coöperative
activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the
reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province
itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather
than individual.

Magnitude
of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War.
From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and
industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the
production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the
self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual
development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the
conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as
enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own
decade have marked the West. Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief
phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it
has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and
a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western
democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the
earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and
more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and
vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to
combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the
rise of those preëminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated
capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation.

If
now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that
have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the
net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:--
Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has
continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United
States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever
capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the
freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the
frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom
to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent
position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and
equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive
legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein
to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the
lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities.
Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies
which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of
highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in
touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces
have shaped our history.

In
the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have
existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing
spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted
with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it
has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the
control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the
importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the
world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the
gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the
means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United
States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies
were but little states with primitive economic conditions.

But
the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under the
conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced the rise of
those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now
raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive.
For the old military type of Western leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew
Jackson, and William Henry Harrison have been substituted such industrial
leaders as James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

The
question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this democratic
experience of the West, and have they acquired sufficient momentum to sustain
themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the days of their
origin? In other words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion
becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy is there in
reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands
of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather
than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality
to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the
domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon
democracy in our own days.

Western
democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the
wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new
chapter in the story of man's struggle for a hi,,her type of society. The
Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest
free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and
artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom
and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and
greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources
that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite
ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after
his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It
was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we
do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of
opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim
Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic
conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is
unmistakably present.

This,
at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the
experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy
through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society
of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise
under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and
well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy,
and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and
with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by
legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but
to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.